know what you have? You have imagination. I am beginning to realize
already on my investment of you. Come up, can you, this evening? Aunt
Lauretta has asked the whole lot of Tibbetts.”
He saw Cornelia with fair frequence. She never asked him to come: and
yet how happy she was when he was there! She disturbed him not at all.
She let him go his way. She came seldom to their flat. But she was
getting somber, it seemed to David. Older as well. The glow of her great
eyes had been a virtue in her homeliness. If they faded, she would be
ugly. Sometimes David thought that they were fading.
“Don’t forget,” Tom said, “Cornelia is past thirty.”
But aside from these rather bleak activities, David found himself empty.
He had no way of making joy and sharpness from his world’s encounters.
When he reflected, he was inclined to blame his dullness. “I am stupid!”
he thumped himself with. And he reflected more. He decided to change. He
did not know in this very decision the kernel of what he sought. Having
resolved to change, he was changed already.
Perhaps it was the new year blossoming. It had been an unusually severe
winter. All winters in New York are unusually severe, and most summers.
New Yorkers have no memory for their chief source of conversation: a
fact that serves to keep it green. But now came occasional mild days
colored blue like the sky, keyed low like the clouds that dawdled over
the City. The great town was no longer an imprisoned foe underneath the
air. It went forth and the air and the town joined forces. David walked
the streets with his coat flung wide so the breeze could seek him out
and thaw those crannies of himself that had been frigid and asleep.
He made several excursions to the country--alone. They proved abortive.
He found it painful to reach the drowsy earth with his drowsy mind. And
yet the earth’s call was dear, now that the buds stood hard on the hard
wood. He could not respond. He could not keep from trying to respond. A
strain.
There were dinners and theater-parties with Caroline Lord. But one day
David found in himself the courage to decide that he detested her. That
this strapping, full-blown woman should take the airs of a secluded
virgin was ill enough: but that, with all her experience of life, she
should display a virgin’s judgments was unbearable. Was Miss Lord
perhaps trying to impress him with her endless thrumming on
respectability, her hymned pæans to the moral outlook? Why should she
care so much for the standards of wealth, who was forever insisting that
her family had been penniless but of high social value? Either this
woman was ashamed of her own intelligence and enterprise or else she
thought David would like to deem her so. David was not sure. Soon he did
not care. Her vigorous solicitude for the manners and customs which she
assumed were _theirs_ had an offensive note. It made David silent and
reserved. It left the field to Miss Lord. So that the efficient lady
preened herself and spread herself and paying no true attention to her
friend had no idea of her effect upon him.
Tom laughed when he told him about her. David found that there was no
difficulty in speaking to Tom about Miss Lord.
“But why should you expect something better of her?” Tom asked him.
“Well, she _is_ capable----”
“Bosh, my dear man. Look at her straight. The only strength she has, I
am convinced, is the strength of Deane and Company--a strength she
sucks.” Tom had met her once. Since then, he had skillfully avoided all
David’s efforts to make him join them some night at dinner. “Now tell me
frankly can you imagine that lady, with her advertised virginity, her
mincing mind and her stiff sense of right and wrong, careering in open
battle? Don’t you see that she is something only in her position? Her
substance comes from the fields whose produce she helps distribute at a
profit.”
“She seems to be forever bowing to judgments like those of Aunt
Lauretta.”
“Of course, since she gets her keep from the same place.”
David had many evenings alone. He found he liked them. He had never
been included in more than a tithe of the whirling activities of Tom
who, now, had added politics to his program. Tom was a member of Tammany
Hall.
“The young men are profiting by the folly of the reformers,” was the way
Tom put it. “They have learnt, Davie dear, as I hope you shall learn
also, generally speaking, that you can’t win a fight without joining
with your enemy. We have done with kid-glove pats at corruption. We are
going to clean up the undesirable elements of the Democratic Party by
first entering their stronghold. That is why we are going into Tammany.”
David had never managed to believe in the monopolized purity of the
Republican Party, although his uncle had spent some breath upon him to
that purpose. Largely, he was indifferent and neutral. He had a sense of
guilt in his organic ignorance about such vital matters. He asked:
“Is your partner, Mr. Lomney, also in Tammany?”
“Lord no!” Tom exclaimed.
And there it was--the incomprehensible that was forever cropping out!
Why, in view of what Tom had just assured him about Tammany Hall, this
protest of denial regarding Mr. Lomney?
“Lomney is a Democrat,” Tom went on. “A Gold-democrat, of course. But he
has no party affiliations of a direct sort.”
“What other sort are there, Tom?”
“There are the really important sort,” Tom smiled. “We are vitally
concerned in certain franchise concessions: traction and gas and the
like. See?”
“Is that the reason Mr. Lomney must not belong to Tammany Hall?”
“That is the reason, rather, why I should,” Tom paused. “We are in where
we should be, and out where we should be. Understand?”
Emphatically, David did not. All he could make of this party business
was that it was a kind of game. The nation’s money-boxes had highly
veneered and colored surfaces. The Republican was more polished, the
Democratic had more color. If one said, “I believe in the blue and gold
design” did one mean, “I get into the coffers by the side that is
painted blue and gold?” David had these little speculations and was
properly ashamed of them. He knew they were the sure consequence of his
being unable to understand.
When he dined alone he was least troubled. There was a Hungarian
restaurant he particularly liked because of the delicious thick soups
and the beer and the caressing music. He went there often and ate
perhaps more than he should, and sat about drinking his beer very
soberly and slowly, puffing at the superb English pipe Cornelia had
given him for his birthday. It had an amber stem and the one flaw in the
delight of smoking was that he needed to be careful not to bite it
through.
On this evening, as usual, he was not alone at his table. At this sort
of place, where a sumptuous meal cost forty cents, one could expect no
more than one’s own seat at the board. Mostly, men came and bowed
stiffly for permission to sit down and were no sooner seated than they
forgot him altogether in their torrents of strange words. Now came a man
with his lady. David listened to them through the meal with an interest
that might conceivably have flagged had he been able to understand the
Magyar tongue. But the complete veil over their words made watching
their faces and their gestures, noting the gait of their voices, a sort
of game. It sharpened their personalities as these revealed them, and as
the community of language must have dulled them. David took delight
trying to break up the endless turgid flow into words and sentences.
Mostly, he had delight in watching the woman.
She was a bursting healthy creature, not yet thirty but ripe and
matronly and at her ease. She wore a pink gauze waist over a covering of
creamy silk that lashed about the rondures of her breast as if its task
were desperate against the fullness of all that flesh. She was not fat
oppressively. Her form was impetuous against the insipid continence of
silk and satin. Her cheeks and her lips were almost equally red. They
were in perpetual motion with food or with laughter--at times with both.
Her hands were short and slight: a wedding ring and two obtrusive
diamonds overloaded the fingers. She seemed not to mind the floating
gaze of David. She talked with greater lubrication when his warm eyes
were on her. David, listening a little as at times to music, had the
sense of clover fields astir with bees: cows brooding in heat and the
smell of milk like mist upon the air. His pleasure of this buxom woman,
whose fine hands showed her sensitive as well, was like his pleasure of
warm spring days in his boyhood, when indeed the women had been drawn
and dry enough but the fields very like this amiable matron, murmuring
strange words across his table.
Most of the men and women he had known bore no kinship even to the soil
they labored. This woman seemed a part of earth. It was a new sense for
David. He leaned back, sweetly astir with his mood. It was over his
loneliness like a miracle, like a sudden bloom of sun and meadow in the
dank streets of the City. It glowed just so bright and wondrous, it was
just so unreal.... He and the strange woman of whom he had no desire
became one: there was a flower in this subtle penetration of her health
and of his mood. About them the heavy clouds of smoke and the thick
waves of words, all the heaving clamor of the room was like the shadow
beyond the burn of a candle. And beyond still farther, the sudden
laceration of the cars, the pound of the elevated trains, the wreathing
weight of the bleak City.... In the heart of it all the single being of
David. He took in fragrance of this outlandish woman as a bee sucks
honey. He was alone with fertile fields....
He got up, he went to the telephone in the side office of the café, he
called Constance Bardale.
“This is David Markand. I want to come to see you to-night.”
She seemed to hesitate: then: “Yes. You may come.”
He had not seen her at all in two months. He had never called on her
alone. He had met her a few times. But always she had that forbidding
smile and the sinuous smile he had known first was hidden away. It was
as if she pitied him for a certain deep defect. She never sought him
out. When they spoke, she had nothing to say. She had not again asked
him to call.
Now, all at once, though five minutes before he had not dreamed of it,
he was to be with her alone! There was a sharp tremor through him as if
he longed to leap but the time was not yet, so that he was impeded: a
tremor like that of a race horse at the post.
He found her standing in a little study he had not seen before. The maid
shut the door behind him. A clouded room in which two lamps pendant with
gray silk shades cast a languid light. Herself within it. They were
somehow close, wherever they stood in the thick room. She wore a
straight and filmy housegown of lavender caught loosely back over her
narrow hips by a golden girdle. The braided cord fell loose and heavy in
front. The room was a place where glowed her gowned body. David was
conscious how he was placeless within it.
She took away her hand at once, sat down. She left him to find a seat.
She had said nothing. He could see her teeth and how she was faintly
smiling, and that her teeth were cutting white against the cloud of her
skin. Her shoulders were sharp and dear in the faint stuff of her gown.
He could have said to himself: “She has _on_ that gown. It is not she.”
Her shoulders were articulate with little movements saying as much. Her
arms came full from the folds of her drooping half-sleeves: her arms
denied in their luxuriance the terse cut of her shoulders.
She left words to David. She did not help him find them. David took long
selecting a place to sit. He took a chair and moved it and moved it
again. He had to be in the right place for sitting: for talking, also.
She watched him, with an uncertain pleasure whose suggestion helped him
since there was no hint he should hurry.
“It was very impetuous of me, I guess, to want to see you all of a
sudden.”
“You see how much I mind.... Then before to-night you did not want to
see me?”
“Did I say that?”
“I think so.”
“I did not, somehow, think of coming.”
“Is that the same thing?”
David paused. “I think not. I think if I had never wanted to come before
I could not so suddenly have wanted to, now.”
“The wish burst out to the surface?” She seemed to be calmly annotating
him.
“That must be it,” David spoke pensively.
“Then, you must answer me two questions.... Why didn’t you want to know
before to-night, that you wanted to come? And what brought you to
knowing at this particular time?”
She was leaning back in her chair and smiling; it seemed to David she
was leaning forward and with serious face. As if this had been the
truth, he reacted. He found himself withdrawing: slightly chilled at
himself as if he had done an extravagant thing.
“Is there no such thing as a mere whim or mood?”
Constance Bardale understood his reversal in a flash. The contest was
on: his dull playing to her hands was over. For a moment she had feared
he was going to be sentimental. She was afraid of emotional words as a
priestess of a desecration at her altar. Here he was, struggling away.
Her delight released the energy of movement. A peal of laughter, low
like her words; a somewhat mental laughter: flush of roused energy which
in a more serious contingence must have turned into flight or pursuit.
She got up and redisposed herself on the couch. Her act was at once, in
its motion, an expenditure of force and, in its specific nature,
preparation for future outlet. David already found in himself the wish
to go and sit beside her.
The fear, lest it be the false thing to do--lest she dislike it, rebuke
him, misunderstand. Misunderstand what? David did not know, because he
found that he did not care. He sat there now, measuring his wish to sit
beside her with what was in her eyes--to find if it fitted.
They chatted. David knew less and less what he was saying, as he grew
more engrossed in the problem of his desire. Did he dare go and sit
beside her? He found no answer in her. Her look, like what she said, was
oblique and opaque. She seemed impenetrable to his seeking mind, but in
inverse ratio she seemed vulnerable to his fleeing senses. His mental
will to measure the effect of his coming to her faded from inanition:
his desire to come was less dependent on intellectual assurance.
He was unconscious of all this. Until, quiet and quick, he was up from
his chair in a silence and beside her. Nothing had happened. He was dumb
and he was empty, as if this coming close had been a mere beginning
after all of what he was about: as if he were still upon his journey.
Nothing had happened. David leaned over to her face that was at profile
from him. At once she turned to him. She gave him her lips. Nothing
happened. He kissed her. He sat beside her silent. The sense persisting
of a way half gone, of a will half done. He felt the sharp power of her
body under a frail gown. Nothing had happened at all. So he took her in
his arms.
She was looking with half-shut eyes into her self. Her lips were half
shut. All of her. He kissed her again. Experimentally: he was trying to
find a certain thing. His hands held the warm stillness of her body:
against his hard breathing he had hidden softness. He kissed her. Then,
he put her away. His heart raced; his blood panted after a sudden hunger
and she sat there smiling. Nothing had happened.
He looked to where she was through a swirl of sense. What should he do?
What should he say? How was it possible that she should love him so
quick? that he had not known before this marvel of loving her?
He took her hand and kissed its open palm. It was cool. His hand ran up
the naked flesh of her arm, thirsting, clamoring. Then, he dropped it
and stood up.
He turned his back on her. He paced the little room. Once, twice: over
and over. He stopped. He looked at her now as if he had never looked at
her before. He was a little way from her. An abyss, an eternity of way
which magic alone could empower him to pass.
Was he not friends with magic? Something spoke in him:
“You have only to step forward and take her.” He could not believe it.
He had never touched her. Magic, magic....
She was a little huddled on the couch. A faint flush on her cheek and
her brow. Her hands half clasped on her lap. Her sharp shoulders rounded
forward. She was magical and helpless. David was strong against her. A
pity came to him that she was so sweet and so resistless beneath his
towering brutality. It was the pity that was sweet and was resistless.
Feeling aggrieved for her that she sat there prostrate, he felt that he
forgave her, that he loved her, and how by this love she must at once be
saved. It was needful to go forth and hold her for her own sake. Lest
she believe he had sullied her, lest she fear he did not know what this
was between them. To herself as to him it was needful that what had come
to pass be good.
He no longer saw her. He was full of the wonder of her sweetness and of
his pity. He was full of the wonder of that she was a woman and given up
to him. He drew all of her against him....
* * * * *
He knew he was walking homeward. The familiar streets whipped past, the
world swung like a sea over the horizon and swept backward above his
head. He walked because it had been impossible to sit cramped and still
in a car. He had to race with his emotions, else something had broken in
him. Calmer he said to himself:
“Why go home? You’re not sleepy.”
He did not know where to go. A garish coldness, the rancid cutting of
alcohol across the sidewalk--a saloon. It appealed to him as a challenge
to an ebullient giant. He entered. He needed to whet the brilliant
splendor of his mood against what was most sordid and drear in all the
world. He went up to the bar and ordered a drink and let it stand,
unable to bring its desecration to his consecrated lips. He was
throbbing gently as if he had run and won a race:--these were remnants
of energy to be disposed of.
The place reeled a bit and then closed in on him. Several fellows sagged
at his side by the bar. One was talking:
“I guv’ him hell. Y’ort to ’a’ seen me guv’ him hell.”
The barkeeper went over the bar with a wet rag and it gleamed. He
looked in the mirror at his thick face above the serried bottles with
undisguised affection. He took a comb from his white vest and parted his
hair afresh in its oily middle. He loved that face. He leaned back and
was lost in love and contemplation. Through a side door, two women loose
over a naked table. Their faces were paste, their eyes were red-rimmed
above two little glasses of whiskey.
“I love her. I love her. I must love her. Why does she love me? Why do I
never understand?” The wonder of the world was as remote from his mind
as his thoughts from this naked room with its hard wood and faces, its
brittle bottles.
One of the women tried to catch his eye. She was half nodding with drink
and disgust. A rotten night. David saw her examining herself in the
mirror. Her face was suddenly sweet. She opened her coat. She folded in
and downward the starched corners of her waist so that her neck showed
and the gap of her bosom. She looked up and smiled at David. She called
for more drink and beat her hand in supplement to her call against the
table. David left. Her flesh had sounded dead against the
shrill-varnished wood.
Tom was propped up with a book, in his black dressing-gown.
“Hello, Davie.” He looked up but did not move. “Have you read
_Gulliver’s Travels_ since you were a kid? Take my advice and do! How
that man Swift must have loved life to have hated men so!”
David thought this was nonsense. “What is there to hate in a thing we
love?”
Tom laughed. “You talk like a god, David. Are you a god? Hate does not
enter into love only where there is paradisal satisfaction. To what
mortal is that granted?” He watched David stand pensively, glowing. With
a searching smile: “Also hate may not enter where there is complete
delusion.” David started. “To have perfection in one’s love, one must be
a god. To have complete delusion one must be--an ass. Are you a god,
Davie?”
“Good night,” said David....
* * * * *
The following evening, he was not to be with her. She had so many
engagements. But she was going to break one so he could come, only three
evenings later.
Through three days David went, repeating to himself that he loved
Constance Bardale. Needful it was to his peace that he be persuaded of
this. Good it would be for the new hunger of his life--to spread forth,
make fresh dwellings for his spirit--if this was true. Yet all that had
occurred was sudden and strange. All this woman was remote. This was why
he had so fast retreated from Tom on that first night. Tom was very
real: in his light, the new fire in himself did not appear. He was sure
that he loved: a transfiguration had been made in him: the future of
Constance Bardale must in some inscrutable way be one with his. Yet he
could not talk of this joyous revelation to his best friend. Indeed,
with his best friend all of it was dim. He did not solve the strangeness
of this. He said to himself: “It is all too mysterious yet to be spoken
of. Tom would not believe me. He would ask me what had happened to make
me know.” Had David these three days seen Cornelia, he could have
spoken. He did not know this since he had no plan to see Cornelia. He
remained with his secret. Wondering, trying to wonder about it, his
thoughts reeled in a dance with his upstarting senses. He could not even
clearly wonder about it all.
The conviction was there, however: he was bound by a sacred tie to
Constance Bardale. He made great what was between this woman and himself
because he needed it great. Also he made it great because he needed
thereby to justify it to himself. Was it not plain how great all this
must be to Constance Bardale? He knew so little of her ways that he had
no sense even of ignorance about her. She was a lady. She was one
fortunate in every circumstance: handsome, intelligent, rich: not one to
alloy or to misprize her value. This lovely lady had given herself to
_him_. A madness must have moved her. That madness love. Or perhaps
something still more sacred: belief in his love, the desire in her heart
that it should be requited. She had miraculously cared for him. But even
this explained little--explained not at all her sudden discard of those
womanly reserves that must be her nature, the swiftness of her bestowal.
This could be explained alone by his own love’s plea upon her. She had
felt and answered his love, before he was aware of it. She had done as
women always by some mystery: given blindly where she was needed, not
asked, not judged,--responded in faith and a sweet helplessness to the
cry of man.
And all his life--whatever she wanted of his life--he owed to repay her.
Feeling his mighty debt to Constance Bardale, David thought of his
mother; and of his mother with his father that last dim year he had
lived, and of his questionings on birth and death and love. What he had
seen and been taught then, the facts of his life had not disturbed since
they were simply heaped upon it. His mother had great pleasure of her
son. When he was near to her, her face brightened. When he came running
and asked: “Take me with you, Mummy, to the village,” she would drop her
basket and fold him in her arms and say: “Put on your leggins, Boy, and
you may come.” It made her happy. Unendingly to give to him was, in her
heart, unendingly to receive. So David learned of women: that they are
mothers and that they hunger after their children and have great joy of
them. His mother loved his father, but she had no joy of him at all. She
took care of him, gave to him, also, without stint. But she seemed to
receive nothing of her bestowal. She never kissed him, as she did David.
When he came into the room, though she was swift to respond to his
desires, it was with heavy face and heavy feet. There was more: his
father made hidden demands on other women, took something from them,
took what the child had once heard called “liberties” with them. For
this, his mother suffered and pitied the women. It was “the poor girl!”
“How could you, how could you, Adolph!” “What is going to become of
Emma!” So David learned of women: that they are the hunted of men and
have no joy of them but only sorrow and humiliation. And David learned
of men: that they can, in some miraculous way, make women sacrifice
themselves, and love them, although this love is a burden and a blight.